


For Fear, Anything

by starlight_firelight



Category: Frankenstein & Related Fandoms, Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because I can, Body Horror, Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Nightmares, Pyromania, Trans Victor Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is a 4' 11'' asexual gay trans man, and if you wish to dispute me in this fact meet me in the alleyway, behind a Paris café with your strongest Sabre and we shall fight to the death., elizabeth lavenza is desi, i'm putting research into this okay i care about it, if he had gotten his shit together, justine and elizabeth are gay don't worry, people of colour abound to be honest, victor frankenstein could have been a wonderful father
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-08-23 15:27:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20245084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_firelight/pseuds/starlight_firelight
Summary: The year is 1883 when Victor Frankenstein's experiments pay off. When Victor Frankenstein finally breaks. When he tries to become a better father, and when he fails. 1883 is a year of great change, for better or for worse. Perhaps change, with all its faults, can lead to a happy ending. Perhaps it can only bring ruin.





	For Fear, Anything

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a pretty heavy piece of writing, so I'll preface each chapter with trigger warnings rather than putting all of them in the tags. If I miss something, please tell me so I can add it to the list.  
trigger warnings for this chapter: body horror; mentions of suicide; death; drowning; nightmares; medical horror; and burning.

_I reason, earth is short, _

_And anguish absolute,_

_And may hurt;_

_But what of that? _

_I reason, we could die; _

_The best vitality_

_Cannot excel decay; _

_But what of that? _

-Emily Dickinson, poem #301

Geneva, Switzerland. 1883, November 5th, 4:26 AM:

Creation.

I was not born, I was crafted. I was stitched together with the gentle care that he might have used with his lover, with the angry tearing of flesh and the tired digging of graves. The first thing I heard was his scream, all full of disappointment and fear and hatred. The first thing I saw was him--pale, sallow, afraid, and thin as sticks.

I was created without a place in the world. He had not bothered to give me one. He ran, when he could have stayed. He screamed, when he could have just said ‘hello’.

I was not borne into the world the way I should have been, and I was not unhappy to know that.

While I was still being created, hewn from flesh-stone, I caught only glimpses of sense. The smell of sweat and the acrid stench of chlorine, the burn of hydrogen peroxide upon my dead and parsed together skin. I was grafted, and I was not yet whole. I did not know that the world would be like this, so cold and dark and musty and full of all things bad. I did not know much except for the cut of the blade, the sting of the needle, the burn of chemicals.

Amongst these things I also knew what was before. I had dim memories, grainy and black-and-white, smudged by time and by death. The flash of bullets, the pull of uniform. The caress on my cheek by someone who would miss me. The lab table, the pain blinding as any shot to the eye. The shaken signing of a document. The grim darkness amongst the smell of formaldehyde and the flesh of others with my same fate. A name, whispered and screamed and sung. Adam. He who is cast out by his creator.

I knew little still when I woke, only slight glimpses of what he taught me. Fear, rejection, disgust. My eyes, flashing in the tinted glass of a mirror as I walked about his paltry space. They were pale and leaky and burning, slim like those of a cat and full of unearned malice that I did not yet know how to feel.

He screeched upon the opening of my eyes, a shrill sound that stays with me still. My creator--near to a father--feared me above all else, falling upon his fainting couch with the sight of me. Is it good, to wake to the scream of one for whom you should feel only love? To burn and cry and laugh with pain amongst the ruins of what could have been a life well lived? I was nothing more than an experiment gone wrong to him, a terror to be put down in the night and never spoken of again.

I escaped in the night, fled from his fainted and frail body and his startled shrieks of terror. Fled from the formaldehyde and the scalpels, the bits of string and the suturing scissors left in my wake. My creators, in a way, were the thread and the scissors, the persevered and the given flesh. I do not like to think of him as my creator, whether or not that is true.

Just before I ran, I took the time to wander into the room in which he lay, the room in which I was created from old flesh and chemicals. He lay there, draped over his chemical-burnt and overused couch. I stood over him, surveying the face of my creator. He was messy, his cheek stained with blood and his long black hair streaked with threads of early white. His skin was grey, and blue veins showed through around his hands. His breath was so weak, fluttering in his chest before rising out of him. His glasses had slid halfway down his face and rested upon the tip of his nose. He was tiny in stature and garbed in a stained and fraying white coat run down the edge with silver buttons over a shirt the colour of his skin.

He was so frail, so delicate in comparison to my huge and bulky frame. He looked as if he might blow away with the dust if I exhaled too heavily.

His eyes opened.

Up he stared at me, fragile breath quickening in his chest and green eyes widening with mortal fear.

I stepped back at his waking, startled by the emotions marring his features. My foot crushed a vial and spilled clear, cool liquid onto the carpet. I tried to speak to him, for I held no bitterness in my stolen chest then, no begrudged hatred for this man—if he could be called a man, boyish and young and slight as he was—I was a blank canvas, ready to be painted upon with blood and fire and poison. I smiled, because it was a thing my decayed face used to do. He recoiled more, and I extended a hand meant to console, not inspire fear. It was an action already performed, a comforting touch spelt in the very fibres of this stitched and soldered arm that was not really mine.

He muttered a sob of horror and slipped from under my reach. He flung himself down the stairs, skipping steps and moving with such a velocity I feared for his china-fragile limbs.

He is not such a person to be worried for, I know now. He is not so much a creator as he is a destroyer, a boy who burns and tears and cuts the things he was meant to stitch together.

I did not understand, at first. He had brought me into this world, so why did he run from me?

Later, I would come to learn why he could not love me. I was a defect. I was the product of two years’ labour and the result was too grotesque for him to accept. I do not think that he thought himself capable of bringing such a monster as I into existence. He could not understand that his hands had wrought from upturned graves and raided university labs the creation that stood over him on that dreary November night.

My blackened lips and grey, rotting flesh interrupted by his stitches were too different than the glowing, life-filled product he had so expected.

I was a failure, and I was to be feared. That is all. I was a flame that burnt blue when I should have burnt red.

I was left in silence after he ran, only accompanied by the chemical-soaked carpet, the vials, and the bed in which I was crafted.

Rejected, my young and nascent mind could barely contain itself in its despair. My only glimpse of life, my creator for whom I could never truly be able to destroy all affection for, had discarded me.

The sound of a slammed door echoed throughout the building and burrowed into my cold, murdered skin. I fled as quickly as I could muster, running in the same manner as he from my dark and cold and solitary place of birth.

Little did I know of the world outside of where I was created. It was all foreign territory to me, that dim and snowy terrain outside of his apartment in Ingolstadt. It burned, to be pushed away in hate and fear, more than the cold of the snow and the bite of the wind. To be made to run away for the sake of my own well-being. 

Let me tell you a little of the boy who made me. My creator, he thinks differently than I. He is not so good a man as I want to think, but one cannot help loving their god, worshipping the hands that made them from dust, whether their wrongs outnumber their rights or not.

His name is Victor Frankenstein, and I am convinced that he was born without an ethical metre, which is what gave him the power to do his filthy, evil work. He thinks not of consequences, and not of others. He is a small man in physicality but a big man in hate and ego. I would burn him, if possible, Burn him to the ground. I would tear down everyone he cares for and use them as screaming crying melting fuel for his witch-pyre.

Sometimes, I consider who I am. I am his man, yes. The accumulation of all of his desires for answers and fame, a narcissistic child of his chemical and metal womb. I fear that I have inherited parts of him, his malice and ice-cold intelligence, his eyes that bore into you as if you where the next body he would use for his creations of life, as if he could see you laid out on the same bed I was, all stitched and grey and preserved in formaldehyde.

The stitches that make me whole, careful and neat and practised as they are, and the greying nature of my flesh, my rotting black lips stretched over bleach-white teeth all lend to the hatred that I am greeted with. There seems to be an instinctual reaction when people see me, to reach for pitchforks and torches and knives as I draw too near.

They want to sever my stitches and see me crumble and rot, seep into the ground and become nothing but bones and dust.

I was hunted at first, followed by men carrying savage, cutting pitchforks and torches bright as the sun in my eyes—tired and accustomed to night as I was. I did not know why they hated me so. I was terrified as I sprinted amongst the trees, hunted for wrongdoings I could not place. I did not know, then, that the only wrongdoing was my skin.

I wandered about around the streets of Geneva, stopping into bars and libraries in search of my friend. People moved about me like water and I moved with them, drawn along in the everyday currents of life. I stood out there, dark and in possession of curly masses of hair that Swiss-men did not have. I wanted to leave---to polluted, too foggy, too different, too small, too loud a place as it was for my country constitution; but I was here for a reason, drawn unwanting from my home by the strings of worry.  
I was sent in search of Victor—my friend since who-knows-how –long. I don’t bother to count the years because, the way I see it, there were no real years before Victor Frankenstein--because he had not written. For two years, not a word. Had he forgotten us? Had he forgotten me? I stood outside a particularly dirty and loud public house, scanning the swaths of passing people for the sight of my friend.

I saw him then, small head bobbing through the traffic and towards the pub I stood outside. I cried out and waved to him, intent to beckon him over. He noticed me, and turned his course to come and meet me with a smile and a wave of his own.

My cry of happiness soon became one of concern, though, and his very appearance made my breath catch in my throat and my heart clench in sympathy.

Small as he is, he seemed even smaller still. His cheeks were sunken and covered in skin that had lost the lustre it had once had, his face grey as that of death. His smile looked unpractised, as if this was the first time he had smiled in the two years since we last had seen each other. His bright green spectacle-framed eyes were ringed with the darkness that comes from losing many a night of sleep, and his hair had grown out, kept fanned and loose around his face. In addition to all of his disarray, he wore a tidy black tailcoat and a shirt stained red and brown.

He reached me, and I embraced him before drawing back to look at him more closely.

“Frankenstein,” I chastised, “Whatever have you done to yourself?” I gasped before he could reply, and moved my hands to his hair, where streaks of silver cut through the inky blackness of it. “Look, you simply must try to take--”

“Clerval, hush,” He reached for my hands and clasped them in his. “I have many a thing to tell, when I am ready to do so, but it is all too fresh now.” He spoke in a voice as tried and tired as the rest of him. He let go of my hands and sunk into my arms with a sigh of relief, resting his head upon my shoulder. “I’ve missed you terribly,”

“And I you, but we should retire to your house now, should we not? Come, let’s make our way,” I took him about the shoulder and led him in the direction from which he had come.

We walked to his house in near silence, us both tired and haggard in different ways and for different reasons.

His place of living was small, but two stories high, painted white with no trappings or furnishings to speak of.

“I’ve come with news from back home. You’ve not spoken to us for two years, and I know you must have been busy, but could you not have sent one letter? One conformation of life? I spent those two years looking through the funeral records in Geneva newspapers, waiting to see your name there in that drab black ink, ready to accept your loss. I wish you could have just written, Victor. Just a word. Just a blank piece of paper with an address in your handwriting, anything,” I said to him as I hung my coat on a coatrack already overpopulated with long once-white now red and brown and fleshy coats, and followed him as he walked with forlorn steps up the stairs, unheeding of my words.

I followed him onto the first floor, where he had sat himself upon a couch placed in the middle of the room. He shook his head, hair dancing around him and water welling in his eyes. “Let me speak not of it, Clerval. God, give me peace,” He brought up his hands to shelter his emaciated face, shoulders shaking in anguish.

I thought all of this secrecy to be strange and unlike my friend, direct and firm as he was when I last spoke to him. My heart ached for him still, to give him comfort and make him happy and wrap him up in sheets till he could never be hurt again. I felt at a conflict of arms then, unsure of whether to go on chastising him or to embrace him and shelter him from the rest of the cruel, cruel world.

“I do apologise for my negligence,” Victor said from behind his cupped hands, “Distract me, please. My mind is far too overtaken with events that I do not wish to recall.”

I moved over to sit beside him on the couch and put an arm around his shoulder. He leaned into my touch, and I began to tell him of my time without him at my side.

“I missed you terribly at first, you know. It was as if a rug had been pulled from under me and I had fallen upon my back, to lose a friend as close as you. I made it alright, of course. My merchantry is paying well. My father says I may be out of apprenticeship by next year if I continue progressing at my current rate, but I am not so sturdy in opinion of my skills,” I searched my memory of the past four years, and came up only with the boring traditions of business and my occasional walks through the countryside. With nothing better to tell him, I told him of my natural findings, the birds and the flowers and insects that so dearly I held in my human hands. I rambled on in this way for what felt like hours, till night had fallen and a storm forced at the window panes. Victor rested without sleep upon my shoulder after a time, and I was afforded an opportunity to wallow in the silence of the room broken only by the roaring of the tempest outside the bounds of my friend’s walls.

His house seemed smaller on the inside, stained and splattered walls pressing in like a prison. The part of the ground floor I had seen looked near unlived in, all crisp and clean. That was contrasted by the utter chaos of the first floor, all toppled tables and blood- stained walls and books on every surface. The only piece of furniture that was right way up was a grand writer’s desk, covered in chemicals and papers and notebooks. The thing that most stood out was a human heart floating in a jar on the edge of the desk. It was swathed in preserving formaldehyde and coloured with it, large and bulbous and fickle in coloration of the flesh that made up its long- dead myocardial tissue. It lacked a pericardium, pale and naked in the light of a lamp standing by the desk, as broken as the world. I stood during my observations, tearing my friend away from rest without meaning to and making him rise with me, his hand upon my shoulder.

I noticed also a door in the corner, locked and shut. “Victor, what are you doing here? And wherever did you get your hands on a human heart?” I asked, puzzled by the oddness of his living quarters.

He muttered something too quiet for me to ascertain, and let his hand fall from my shoulder. I tore my eyes from the room and looked at him to find him white as a ghost, eyes rolling back inside his delicate skull. He pressed his hands into his eyes with such a force that his glasses fell from his face and onto the burgundy carpet beneath our feet. “Clerval, so terrible is the thing that I’ve done, so abhorrent a creation, so profane and wrong a deed,” he cried, stumbling back and too far away from me. He took a hand from his face to point outside the window, fingers shaking and thin as glass. “God, he has found me! Save me, whatever shall I do?” He looked out in horror at the silhouette of a tree lighted by electricity waving its burning hands outside.

He toppled, knees giving out and joints failing him. I awoke from my shock in time to reach him, catch him, cradle his delicate form in my arms. I wanted so badly then to protect him, fold him into me and shield him with the armour of my ribs. Keep him locked away in a place where no one could touch him, safe and content. I lifted him, tiny and light as air, and carried him to a couch overturned but righted without much effort. I placed him there, careful as if he were glass.

I pulled up a chair sat sideways by his desk, curling into its hardwood grain and wishing the world gone. How quickly situations change, how dark the sky becomes with storm when you are too busy to notice. 

Victor stirred in the depths of the night, wresting me out of a fitful sleep with moans of pain and fear.

He sat up on the couch I had laid him upon, looking as if still in a trance, eyes glazed over but expression one of terror; it was as if he was in another place, viewing some atrocity from which I could not shield his eyes and cover his ears. He grasped at my slumped waist, pressing his face into my abdomen as if to muffle screams unheard by anyone save for him. Unsure of what to do for my delirious and ill friend, I brushed his hair from his feverish forehead and rubbed unborn tears from his eyes. I sat him upright on the couch, grasping his trembling hands in mine and whispering assurances to him through the dark. His plain expression of vacant fear struck fear into my own heart, as I was forced to wonder what lay prowling in the shadows that he feared so,  
what horror birthed from the juvenile fears of man might stand behind me, might conceal itself beneath the tree at the window.

I chided myself for being so easily frightened, though the situation I found myself in was not one of comfort.

I leaned in to embrace Victor’s shaken figure in comfort and he rested his head upon my shoulder with a sigh of what I thought to be gratefulness, finding rest in a place his head had lied so many times before.

I sat there with him for at least half of an hour, rocking with the pounding of the rain against the windowpane and waiting for his slumber to cease. My exhaustion at the strangeness of the events that had transposed that night made a second sleep easy, a thing fitful yet inescapable, like slipping into lake-water after a long day in the sun.

I slept, dreamless and short, till I was startled by the awakening of Victor Frankenstein.

He awoke with all the violence and haste of a summer storm, starting from unconsciousness and gasping for breath. He clung ever closer to me in an attempt to breathe again. His fear is what woke me, stabbing into me, as effective as hot metal searing into my stomach. I stood, supporting Victor by gripping his heaving shoulders.

“Victor,” I murmured, clinging his too- light body into mine. “Hush, everything is alright. No, no, don’t cry, please,” I brushed a nascent tear from his eyelash. “There’s only a storm, nothing more,” his breath slowed to a healthier pace as I did all could to assure him, laying him down with all the caution I could exercise and sitting upon the floor in front of him.

I feared he would go to sleep then, go to sleep and never wake, burn in the night with fear, choke and cease breath. I exhaled. I leaned down closer to him, my head resting upon his chest.

“Henry?” Victor whispered in a slight and strained voice.

“Yes?”

“Henry. I’m terribly sorry. God, Henry, I thought you were dead—I thought you were him,” Victor moved my head from his chest with his earthquake fingers and propped himself up on his elbow. “I dreamt--you were him, I could have sworn it--I dreamt a terrible dream,” he coughed, more sob than anything else. “I had a child, I had a child and I threw it out a window and I cracked its little underdeveloped head I the pavement and it was everywhere, he was all scattered upon the ground in little unlived bits and—oh god, what have I done?”

I moved along the couch to instead lay my head upon his knee. His tremors were so strong that they translated themselves into my skull. “A child? I do apologize, but I haven’t any idea of what you mean. Tell me, what did you do?” I waited for an answer. None came, and dread pooled in my gut at the idea of all the horrible things he could have done. “Victor? God, what did you do?”

He moved a hand to my hair, tugging at my untied curls. “So terrible a thing, Clerval. I have not killed a child, if that is the place that your mind goes to. What I have done is still worse,” he let horror and bitterness deep into his voice, and the dread only grew in my gut. “I did not give birth, either, though I may as well have.”

“You speak in twisted words. Come, I bid you, you can tell me. What on earth have you done?”

“I have created a monster, Henry. I might as well have birthed him, as should my string and stitches.”

“What?” His words did nothing to satiate my unease.

“I found the secret to life, Clerval. I created a man,” he took me by the shoulders and stood up using me for support, moving around my still-kneeling form and began to pace the room. I moved from my position to drape myself across the couch and lay back my head.

“I created life. Life! I brought a man into the world with my filthy business and I ran from him, because, in the end, my sutures could not make a proper man from rotted flesh and animal teeth. He is disgusting, in the same way rot and dead animals are disgusting, and I made him, brought his horror into the world. I made him to be beautiful, of all things,” his speech had turned frantic, and he tore at his already damaged and early grey hair. I rose from my prone position to take his hands into mine, grip them tight as if I could save him from his own tormented mind. My own head swirled with a myriad of emotions, some good and some bad, most concerned. I found a small tug of unease at talk of birth and rot and creation, but that was overridden by my worry for my friend’s sanity.

“All of this news of monsters is absurd,” I said to him in an attempt to voice my worries in the least abrasive way that I could.

“Absurd? Absurd, Clerval, is not two year’s hard work, not creation and godhood —dare I say—not life, not upturned graves and raided morgues. My work is not absurd. Absurd is god, is denial, is not this,” he said, with all the snarl of a wolf, wresting his bony hands from mine.

“What do you mean, though? I said, reaching to retake his wrist before he could step away from me and into his own world. “You speak of impossible and illegal things. Grave robbing? I did not think you so low,” he opened his mouth to retort in his bloody, vicious way, tired brow furrowing in anger. “No, Víctor, let me go on. You really do sound of madness, however sorry I am to say it. You are my closest companion, more than a friend could ever hope to be. I wish not to cause you any distress, but if you should thank that you need to—“

“What? Be put away?” He interrupted, his expression growing more irritated by the moment. “Locked up and put in and institution? I made life, Clerval. Can you not see past your own scientific limitations?” His conceived words did no help for my tired state of mind. Fear and exhaustion won over my will to argue against Victor’s sanity, and I sighed, whipping my brow.

“Victor, I’m tired. Look, I’m not trying to say that I think you should be institutionalized, I am merely sceptical. If you can show me even a glimmer of proof that the things you say are true, I will believe you,” I moved to sit down, pulling him with me. He complied, curling into himself beside me.

“I am not proud of what I have failed so terribly to do,” he muttered, voice muffled as he pressed his face into his arm.

“But what exactly have you done? I might be able to understand your strange story if you would actually tell it,” I settled further into the couch and looked as his sad and solemn pose. I could not help but hope that he knew how much I would always care for him, how incapable of hating him I was at that time. I may have excused him for throwing an infant out the window, then.

He groaned and sunk further into the couch alongside me, resting his head upon my shoulder. “I first had the thought of creating life two years ago,” he began with a reluctant tone, shaken still with some degree of fear. “I was interested in alchemy at the time, and when the idea occurred to me, I buried myself in it completely. I cannot tell you how I did it, brought him back from his grave, for fear of such a horror being repeated. I can tell you how I dug graves and took bodies from morgues and prisons and butcheries— yes, butcheries,” he said in reply to a look of absolute horror that crossed my face at the mention of butcheries. “My creation is not human, nor animal, an amalgamation of an entire new species. I created him to be perfect. Perfect! What an atrocious irony, now I can see—I created him to be new and unburdened, beautiful and friendly. I took a brain from the university lab and sewed it into his skull. Just last night he awoke, brought into life more foul and ugly than I ever could have thought possible,” at this point, Victor choked back a sob, pushing his face into my shoulder with all the force he could muster, quieting his already near-silent voice. “He was disgusting, Clerval, horrifying in a way I never could have predicted. I will not tell you now, for that night is too horrible to remember. He escaped though, and with all luck is long gone,” he finished, sighing as if his brief story had been a great toil. 

The thing that disturbed me most about his tale was not that there was a monster ransacking Geneva, but rather that he had left a creature all alone moments after its creation, that it had been greeted with the same look of fear and disgust that Victor had worn when he described it.

“You just let it leave?” I asked after a moment of silence spent gathering my thoughts into logic.

“Yes, i let it leave. I wanted it to leave, am glad that it’s gone. Were it dead, if I had the power to end what I had started, I would be all the happier.”

I spent a minute thinking of all he had said, of artificial birth and soldered skin and terrible eyes. I thought of nascent limbs and a young brain, the reaching of a desperate hand towards a could-be-mother. He was young and he was detested. I thought of children left on street-sides by poor mothers. I wondered if any of those children ended with a part sewn into his homunculus. I thought of my Victor, father in his own right, caster of sons.

“I think, Victor, that you are too cruel,” I said to him. I was ripped in the gut by his look of seething that used to be so common. The resurfacing of emotions long grown out of.

“Do you think me vicious? I said so before, but as my thoughts have gathered I have more thought that I am in the right. I have not so much abandoned a baby as I have cast away a monster, Clerval. Do not confuse these things.”

“I do not think you vicious, Victor. I think you are wrong. You have abandoned an infant, however you wish to frame it.”

“I loathe to know you think such a thing, Henry.”

“I loathe to know that you would do such a thing as leave your own creation because he was not as pretty as you intended to be. You colour yourself in poor light, my friend,” I knew Victor to be weak in his abilities of self-reflection, but I only hoped that he would cave his iron will in this time.

“Let poor light colour me, Henry. I will not go out in search of my monster on a mothering whim of yours.”

“Victor, in speech of mothering whims, is this creature— is this creature yours? Did you release upon the world an infant with your genetics? Because if you wanted to mother a child—“

“Dear god, this is not time or place to speak of that, please. I hope never to mother a baby full proper. The only association my work has with motherhood is creation. Nothing more,” Victor said, face curling with disgust at the very idea of the thing I wished to insinuate.

“Has anyone taken advantage of your situation? Because if you need me to, I have quite the fist for striking.”

“Henry. Please, please, speak no more of it. I have birthed no one and I remain celibate. In fact, I find your assumption that I would so much as have the time to partake in such activities as debauchery atrocious.”

“I apologise. I seem to have overstepped. But the offer of a fist or a defending word is always available, my friend. I care very deeply for you and do not wish to see you harmed.”

You see, my friend was created in an odd way as well, not of stitches and preservatives but of a body that does not match his mind. He is not too uncommon, though folk such as him usually succumb to drink and vice to cope. Victor would rather bury himself in science, the very thing that seeks to betray him. He is a man who coughs and chokes and faints for the wrapping of his chest and who insists upon weathering the worst of medical afflictions for fear of loosing his secret upon the world. While most men are born in a man’s body, my friend was stuck in that of a woman. An inhumane action of Mother Nature that he does his very best to remedy. I thought at first that he had given birth—if his body still possesses the capability of such a thing, bandaged and beaten as he has been. It would seem, however, that he has skipped too many steps and isolated himself too much from what surrounds him.

“What is on your mind? You have been silent for many a long moment,” Victor said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

“I remain firm in my standing. We must venture out and find your creature, because he is as much a person as you or I and because you have a responsibility to him,” he made his mess, he now had to clean it up.

“I can’t fault you for your Ideas, but you must remember that you did not see him. He is not so human as you would like to think. He is a brute, a monster, but no more,” Victor frowned, reaching to pick up his glasses from where they fell on the floor hours earlier. “You cannot save him, Henry.”

“I think you are incorrect. You said I was blinded by my scientific limitations, but rather you are blinded by your ethical ones,” I said, anger sneaking into my voice even as I tried to curb my temper.

“Ethical limitations?”

“You created life, Victor. Life. Was this affair planned so poorly that you had no solution for the event of your creation not being perfect?”

“Of course. I have a gun, there,” He motioned to a box set on his desk, innocent and innocuous at first glance, now poisoned by the knowledge of the weapon concealed inside.

“A gun? Oh god, Victor,” I stood up and took a ribbon from my waistcoat pocket with which to bind my hair. “A gun? A gun. You have a gun.”

“It serves as insurance. I have yet to use it, if that helps your picture of me.”

“I think that this is all enough. A gun? What else do you have locked away in mahogany? You are not the same as you were four years ago,” I wished he had not changed, wished that he was the same boy that left all those years ago. But we are twenty-one and twenty-two respectively now, and I am sure that I have changed as well.

“Do you wish to know? Truly, Henry, I wish to keep nothing from you. I have not changed so much as to cease liking you. I will tell all, if you wish. Though I cannot promise I will remain conscious through the whole affair. I wish I was better, but I am so _hateful_. I hate and I hate and I hate, Henry, and I have done this to myself. So no, I do not believe that I am the same as I was,” He said as he stood up beside me. He scared me in his sadness, cool and sharp as the slice of a blade. 

He has always been intimidating in his own way, even though he fails to reach my nose in height and is as skinny as an unfed cat. He scared me then because it was not I he could hurt, it was himself. Victor Frankenstein will go to any lengths to hurt himself when he is of a particular disposition. The gun in his box brought me fear not because it might shoot someone but because it might shoot Victor, a bullet fired from his own fingers.

Because I did not want to see his brain matter splattered against the wall in grisly dripping streaks, because I did not want his blood again to stain my hands, did not want him to fall upon the floor with nothing in him but flesh and organs. I did not want him to press his gun into his abdomen and pull its trigger, did not want him to scream and curl in on himself, did not want his sweet blood to paint the floor redder than it already was, to squish in the carpet as it dried and clotted and turned sticky.

“You can tell me anything. I would not betray you, understand,” I reached to take his arm for comfort from the strangeness of the moment. “I trust you, Victor, though I feel that you are wrong.”

“Would it calm you if we were to go out in search of my creation?”

“Of course not, though it is the right thing to do. In fact, I could use some fresh air. Your house smells worse than you do, and that is a feat,” I smiled and corrected the position of his collar, skewed in his anxiety. “You are quite the mess, friend. It would do to clean you up, but perhaps first we can go for a walk in the woods?”

My friend sighed with reluctance but nevertheless moved to retrieve his coat from the floor. “We shall look for an hour or two but no more, understand? And if we find nothing we shall return.”

“Indeed. Come, make sure you bring a hat. It is still raining, after all.”

I was near to senseless at first, wandering through browns and greys that opened into nighttime greens of what I could not have known then was forest. I was of a world of blood and darkness, of formaldehyde and needles and burnt-together flesh. I did not come easily into this world, struggling to walk and breathe and see. I looked at my hands, monstrous and stitched together. I was hewn from flesh like a statue is hewn from clay, and I knew this the moment I gazed at my grafted fingers.

I moved about the forest in bitter stupidity, wondering over every little thing I came across.

The first night was the hardest, hungry and cold and alone. I burned with a fire I did not have, seething and hating so soon after my creation. Between my thoughts of hatred and my movements of despair, I searched and worked to encounter some form of food. My marvel for the world still did not cease, a naïve interest in the darkness of shadows, the bark of trees.

It was all so new then, unspoiled by foul reality. The only thing there was to hate was my creator, and hate him I did. I hated him as I found a berry I could eat, hated him as I drank brackish and befouled water, hated him as I saw my first strike of lightning through the downpour of a storm. Victor Frankenstein was a man to be hated, a father who could have been more than loathed. I burned him. In my innocent mind I built his pyre and rejoiced in his death- screams, in his bound thrashing and misery. I thought of him so because I had to, because his pain was my only link to reality. The November cold and the pouring rain seeped as ardently into my stolen bones as did thoughts of him.

I found fire on my second day, a roaring blaze steaming in nascent rain. It was brought from the sky, kindled by pine sap and dry November leaves. A world of rot, burnt into one of ash. The lightning had halved the sky, streaking through the blinding rain with power unparalleled. Fixing on its target and dealing a killing blow, swift as it was unmerciful. Power was its goal, pure destruction, burning, murder, dominance. I was affixed, void of thought and hate and youth. I was empty and full and tired and rested in the glare and the burn and the fire.

The trees caught flame and burnt, lucky to be rained upon. I think of that pyre still, seared into my memory as permanently as the lines that mark my skin. Burn and burn and burn. I wished everything to burn in that moment, I wanted to run into the fire if only to sacrifice myself as fuel. I did not know if formaldehyde caught fire, though.

The rain won, in the end, burning the fire to nothing in its constant falling from the sky. I was sad to no longer see flame, sad that the rain quenched its own creation before it could overtake and absorb all the world. I hated the rain for staunching its child.

I hated so much then, even though looking back it seems like not a lot. Hatred is a facet of humanity I inherited when I did not inherit their new flesh and unstitched skin, their bright eyes and organs that are their own. I was motivated by fire then, by a need to burn the world. I set about a creation of my own then, a triumph to overtake the soldered skin given to me by my creator.

I built a careful pyre, stacking sticks upon branches upon logs and covering my creation in leaves and grass and needles of pine. I built it beneath a tree, on grass, near a bush. I built it to be grand and beautiful, everything that I am not. It was mine, I had brought it into the world with calloused hands and tired breaths and the work of a few hours. I burnt it with the last smouldering screams of lightning- fire, alive even as the clouds parted with my second sunrise.

I let it burn as I sat and waited and basked in the destruction of it. I burned things in its maw, berries and nuts and roots. Some things improved in the fire, and some things did not. Some things did not change at all, stagnant and stubborn. I tried to burn myself, after I had burnt all else, curious and lusting for the feeling of flame upon my fingertips. I was disappointed. It hurt, a different pain from the cast-away burn left in the wake of Frankenstein. A piercing pain, immediate and real. My hands flung themselves out of the fire without my telling them to, an action habitual and seared into the history of the flesh that was not mine.

The flesh and the stitches that I had exposed to my pyre curled in pain, smoked and bubbled like berries, run red with blood from fire-popped blisters. My blood was foreign to me then, no more than strange red liquid that still was not mine. I wished that my flesh was the flesh boiling on my bones, that I owned the body I inhabited. I wish he had not sewn my hands, had not torn my skull from the ground. He had asked no one for rights, so I was a thieved creature made from foreign blood and bones and brain.

I hated the fire for burning me and bringing me pain. How dare my creation defy me? I made it, built it from nothing and it repaid me in ruined flesh and boiled blood, a hand I could no longer use.

That was the first time I cried, screamed in betrayal until the birds fled and the mice raced away. The fruit of my labour was bitter pain, nothing more.

I was weak when they found me, my creator and his sunshine friend. I felt bitter jealousy well up in at the sight of his companion, linked in step and speech as they were when they happened upon me. How dare he share so close a bond with one who was not I? I, the product of his hands and mind, the fully extant being realised on a bed that he once had slept upon? I, a son, a shadow, a projection. 

I stood behind my fire when they noticed my presence, wishing I could flee but not wanting to leave my creator alone with the bright and concerned friend onto whom he latched his hand, as if his friend’s shoulder was the only thing tethering him to earth.

  
I saw him there, huddling behind a fire built as the Vikings would have built a pyre, a cairn in which to burn such a monster as he. His flesh was all decay, grey with mould and yellow with jaundice. A thing created to be perfect. How perfect he was, in horror and atrocity. He looked like the kind of monster that was so terrifying, so ruined, that it was undeserving of a name. Or perhaps deserving of namelessness. His flesh tore from his bones in places, exposing a jaw, a femur, a metacarpal. Stitches torn by apathy. Perhaps the worst of him was the sutures, his soldered and grafted skin and tendons and nerves. Victor’s work had been neat, clean and painstaking in their uniformity, but they were striking in their wrongness. The stitching together of this creature was a mistake, and one could tell.

I could not help but feel an enormous amount of sympathy for this strange creation alongside my disgust, all an odd myriad of emotion. I stepped nearer to Victor— for what, I do not know. Protection or solace or understanding.

He stood behind that fire, all gore and stitches, and he stared. He did nothing but look, forlorn and angry and hateful and piteous all at once. He was a creature made to be pretty. I could see that, in his large stature and well-proportioned limbs, in pale eyes that once were blue. He burnt with the same fire that surrounded him.

I took a step forward, transfixed by his oddity. He bared his teeth, glaring beneath the darkness of his flesh. Rot, allowed by the uncaring of Victor.

Victor himself dared not draw as close as I, letting his fingers slip from my sleeve. He looked terrified, petrified, and unable to move for the fear of him. I moved along anyways, ignoring the concerned squeak of my friend. The person in front of us was his doing, his handiwork, but he had no right to his creation. Gods can only abuse the characters of their stories.

He mustered the courage to step beside me, to face what he had sewn. His hand fit back into its place curled in my sleeve.  
His repugnance was what made him pretty, the creature. His stitches still bleeding and his hand ruined by fire beautified him in a grotesque way.

“That is awfully unsanitary, you know,” Victor, his look of fear and hatred replaced by one of scientific concern.

The creature reacted to the sound of his creator’s voice, stepping around his cairn of nuts and fire. Less a cairn, in reality, huge and formed as a pyre. A place on which to burn people as well as food. His tangled hair drew close to catching aflame, spared only by the swinging of the wind. It ran down his back and morphed into loose curls at his hips, where he gripped sheaves of it to tether himself in the same way Victor clasped my sleeve. 

They were similar then, it and he, both afeared and curious and hurt and storm-ridden.

The creature moved past the fire, ethereal and devilish. He did not burn in the flames, for why would he burn? Victor transferred his hand from my arm to my waist. It is not I who needs protection, I wanted to tell him, but touch is touch and I did not want him to take his hand away. I never really wanted this scene to change, just the creature and him and I.

Silence that had existed for the past few seconds was burned and hung when the monster tried to speak.

“Awful?” He said, all strangled and confused as if his vocal cords did not yet know how to move on their own.

I startled at this, reaching to grab the back of my friend’s waistcoat. “Victor. Victor, it’s--”

“Talking. I know. Oh god, was I wrong. Look at him! He’s—well, he’s hideous, but he’s alive! And he’s mine!” Victor took a step closer to his creation, who now stood just feet away from us. I did not want to draw so near, but I followed because touch is touch and I was tired.

“Hello,” Victor said, tilting his head as he surveyed his work “I have been too lenient in my care these past hours. Come, it was wrong of me to run from you. Let’s return home,”

The creature looked on in confusion. “I do not think he understands you, Victor. He’s only a day old,” I disconnected myself from him in a moment of courage—a thing that seemed to come and go with more haste than the tide—and stepped to touch his creation. I did so with the same care I might exercise if reaching to pet a feral cat or some other animal of the wilds. 

“Old—only?” The creature muttered, permitting me to take his arm and hold it perpendicular to the ground as I inspected his infected stitches and raw, decaying flesh.

“You’ve done a poor job in putting him together, Victor. He’s all infected and I think he might have septicaemia. I’d employ you to take him home,” I said, attempting to call up what little medical knowledge I had learned in secondary school. 

“Here, Henry, I’m the maker, I’ll look with a better eye than you,”

“Okay,” I stepped back and allowed my friend to step forward. As he did the creature stepped back, face curling into an expression of anger.

“Don’t,” the creature said, forcing out words that he did not seem to want to speak. 

“Look, Henry, he’s already speaking!” Victor reached out and took the same arm I had just held with a degree of roughness that I thought unwarranted. “What is your name? Do you remember what it was like to die?”

“Victor, you can’t expect him to talk so eloquently so quickly. Be kind, please,” I said.

“I suppose. Let’s get him home, shall we?” Victor took the creature’s other arm and tugged at him. “Come along, we best get you home and get you cleaned. I daresay that we all need a good bath and a cup of tea. You’ve never had tea, have you? It’s fantastic. I’ll give you some, once we deal with the mess you’ve got yourself in.”

The creature only nodded, and walked along with unpractised steps as Victor dragged him away from his pyre. I followed feet behind, bothered by the ease of the creature’s submission. It did not seem right, that the creature should go with the same man that allowed his stitches to tear.

I went with him not because I wished to, but because I had no other option.

My hand burned as if it still was shrouded in flame, smarting at any touch. My stitches were coming undone and my feet that for so long had spent time buried in the dirt found walking upon it disagreeable. I needed care, and he could provide. By that time I had started to think more with logic than with fear and with anger, and I knew that if I was to survive in this new form I would be in need of a ‘cleaning up’.

I walked behind my creator wishing that he would take his hand from my arm and treat me as he treated his friend, but to no avail. I did not have the words then that I needed to speak the words I wished to speak.

Thought was a strange thing, because without words thought is barely thought. Colours and ideas that floated through my mind were no more than figments, tiny conceptions that had no grounding in language. I did not know the word for something so I was a creature of perception and no more.

The walk back lasted for what could have been ten minutes and could have been an hour, but before long we had exited the trees and made our way into Geneva. My creator’s house was located near the border, about a mile away from where roads ceased and houses bled into trees. 

I was in a stupor when they arrived at my creator’s lair, was near to comatose as he bandaged me and restitched me and gave me penicillin. 

I was numb because I was dead and because I was a prisoner in my place of birth. 

I was numb when night fell too soon, was numb when they locked me in the very room I had been alive in. 

Colour and sound and touch blended together to form one, the stench of crusted blood and the feel of bandages done tightly over my limbs, the sight of chemicals and toppled furniture and blood dripping and clotting and crusting like an armour over the room.

I was numb even as I fell asleep with the sun, unfeeling and uncaring and _tired_.

  
I dreamed bad dreams that night. Hated and poisonous dreams.

_The creature, halved and bleeding out upon my floor, spine cracking and limbs tearing._

_Myself on an operating table, Victor Frankenstein looming over me in all of his ghostly glory. His hands reaching into me, tearing me apart from the chest with a bone saw and taking out my heart. Viscera coating his hands, bridging him and me, tying us together. Him struggling to sever my aorta, tearing away flesh. Blood running in viscous streaks down his hands, onto his shirt. Stained red as sunset, as fire. His hands flaying away myocardia, endocardia, till my heart is no more than a pile of once-flesh in his bare and bloody hands. A new heart, taken from a jar. Pale, stagnant, stinking of formaldehyde. Him holding my ruined heart in one hand, his preserved heart in the other. Him putting the preserved heart back, taking up his bone saw and splitting open his own chest. Me, wanting to scream but unable, only dust in the air cursed to watch and do nothing. Victor taking his heart from his own chest, leaving a hollow that seeps blood from severed veins, blood that drips in clotting puddles onto the floor. Sewing my flayed and destroyed heart back into one, putting it inside his own chest. Sewing it up, ceasing the blood. His shirt all red, dripping and dark and turning brown with time. Taking his heart, whole and beating and bleeding red red red. Him placing it inside my chest, stitching his aorta to mine, his pulmonary veins to mine, his heart still beating and no longer bleeding inside my chest. Him putting back severed ribs and flesh, stitching together muscle and skin until the only thing left is stitches and blood and red all over, only red and viscous, the room flooded with our blood, with the food of our mutual hearts. Blood, red and brown and purple, flowing everywhere until nothing is left, his dark-and-white hair thick with it and my vision no more with it. The sound of his heart, beating from beneath my severed ribs. Blood all over, nothing else, him gone, me alone. His heart, all that is left. The preserved heart, floating just outside of my vision, red red red red. Blood too thick and clotted to move through. I swim but I cannot, his heart so weak in my chest, so wrong. Nothing right, all blood and clots and bits of flesh, nothing else, all red._

_Victor Frankenstein, screaming over his creation, crying out in fear and in more. Grinning, inhuman eyes. _

_Victor Frankenstein, pulling the strings of the world, god._

_Tearing flesh and rendering muscle from bone, surrounded in rot and chemicals and fire. _

_Victor Frankenstein, burning in a pyre, screaming, skin melting and bubbling and boiling. _

_Victor Frankenstein burning and dying and calling my name for help. Me, ignoring him, covering my ears and crying in a corner, his heart beating too strong in my chest for me to breathe._

_Victor Frankenstein lying on a bed and succumbing to consumption, air leaving his lungs and oxygen leaving our heart. The end of the world. Ragnarok. Armageddon. Shiva, dancing the world to death. _

_Death, standing over his ravaged and torn apart corpse, realising that there is no soul to release, that he never even had one. He was always only flesh._

_Silence, then red again, only red, ever red, nothing more. Blood and viscera and the burned remains of Victor Frankenstein drowning me, blood set afire and mixed with formaldehyde and gasoline, blood blood blood blood everywhere, Victor’s blood in my hair and in my teeth, in my throat choking me, prohibiting me from death and killing me all at once. All there is, all there was, blood and bits of flesh, no more. _

_Victor Frankenstein, sewn together and corpse-like, dead and grey and rot, flies around, blood and then more blood. floating in a river of blood with his stitched-together body bobbing beside me, stinking and decaying and eyes so blank and lifeless that they never were filled with existence. rotten sockets and frayed cloth, hair torn from his scalp and broken bones twisting his suspended figure._

_My hands wrapped about his china throat, torn skin and purple bruises, a face blue when it should be grey, his gasps and his pleads meaning nothing for the anger beneath my own skin. Light leaving his eyes and face falling limp, gone and murdered. The unsheathing of a knife, the plunging of a blade into his/my heart, the end of my life because there never was any Henry Clerval without Victor Frankenstein, my Romeo, my Benedick, my Ophelia._

_Victor Frankenstein holding my face in his glass hands. Things curled up and died in such hands as his, but I_ lived, _him breathing new life into the heart that once was his, his killer’s eyes marking my face with their findings. How gentle he was, then, until his brow stitched in the same familiar way it always did, until he began to shake and to cough up blood, until he was less coughing it up as he was vomiting it as it was running out of him in streams, pooling where we stood and swallowing us and dragging him as meat from me, leaving me alone in blood. More blood, always blood never anything else, why would there be anything else? Blood and I, red and pale, dead and alive. Victor’s and my severed and stitched again heart, all alone and drowned in blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood blood_

**Author's Note:**

> -please, shower me in praise  
-keep in mind that this is a draft and i'll probably be reworking it later  
-I set this in 1883 rather than in the 1700s for two reasons: one, formaldehyde and lab coats did not really exist in the early 1800s. Formaldehyde was invented in 1868 and lab coats didn't become popular until at least the nineties. Second, views around homosexuality are vastly different on both ends of the 19th century. It was easier to be gay in the earlier half of the century, mostly because that good old Victorian homophobia hadn't properly set in yet. (See Anne Lister for a good example of a Georgian lesbian living her best though dubiously amoral life) Things were getting worse in the late 1810s though, as imprisonment and punishment of gays became more frequent. Our lord and saviour, Oscar Wilde, wasn't arrested for homosexuality until 1895, and as we neared the tail end of the nineteenth century, things were getting pretty bad for us queer folk. I am an author who just wants to put her characters through as much pain as possible. Don't @ me.  
-If I find the money or the motivation, I might try my hand at self-publishing the finished product of this. We shall see.


End file.
